BUG | ACF Fields do not work for Meta Description

Hello,

We apologize for the issue you are facing with the ACF fields not working as expected for the Meta Description in Rank Math. It seems that Rank Math prioritizes the native excerpt field over custom fields when generating the Meta Description, which is causing the behavior you described.

Currently, the custom field variable (%customfield%) does not work directly for ACF fields in the Meta Description due to how ACF stores values. Rank Math will use the excerpt if it is available, and only fall back to the custom field if the excerpt is empty.

To achieve your desired outcome, you can define a new variable using a filter to get the value from the ACF field and use it in the Meta Description. Here’s a general approach:

1. Add a filter in your theme’s functions.php file to create a custom variable that retrieves the ACF field value.
2. Use this custom variable in your Meta Description settings instead of %customfield(leistungen_-_hero_subline)%.

Here’s an example of how you might set this up:

add_filter( 'rank_math/json_ld', function( $data, $jsonld ) {
    $data['metaDescription'] = get_field('leistungen_-_hero_subline'); // Replace with your ACF field name
    return $data;
}, 10, 2 );

3. Update your Meta Description settings to use this new variable.

This way, you can ensure that the ACF field value is used for the Meta Description regardless of the content in the native excerpt field.

If you need further assistance with implementing this solution or if you encounter any issues, please reply to this ticket, and a human agent from our support team will assist you further.

Thank you for bringing this concern to our attention!

Hello,

You can set the custom variable in Rank Math > Titles & Meta settings and after that use the following filter code to force Rank Math to use that:

add_action( 'rank_math/frontend/description', function( $description ) {
 global $post;
 $desc = RankMath\Post::get_meta( 'description', $post->ID );

 $post_type = get_post_type(get_queried_object());

 if (($post_type == 'your_post_type')) { //change 'your_post_type' with the actual CPT
 $desc = RankMath\Helper::get_settings( "titles.pt_{$post->post_type}_description" );
 if ( $desc ) {
 return RankMath\Helper::replace_vars( $desc, $post );
 }
 }

 return $description;
});

Here’s how you can add filter/hook to your WordPress site: https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/

Let us know how it goes. Looking forward to helping you.

Thank you.